Context: Scientist: Extent of DDT dumping in Pacific is ‘staggering’ As a species and (such as it is) a Global civilisation, we surf on the breaking waves of short term advantage while incessantly displacing cost and complexity into the future as “someone else’s problem”. In contexts such as this instance of toxic envenomation of an […]
If it is true, as I currently believe, that language manifests or instances an adaptive and emergently complex holistic structure that partially pre-processes (and stores, distributed for resilience and redundancy against loss that) information, the question of cognition-as-ordered-thought becomes one of just how much of our choices and self-determination is outsourced or displaced to the […]
Note: this was originally written as a response to a specific contemporary geostrategic context for an audience that was spectacularly uninterested in my opinion, so I share it here just to keep it in some modest sense “alive” as a bundle of ideas. I can’t help but wonder if the threat of war is itself […]
Conflict is the flip-side of a difference that is itself the necessary condition for the production and definition of information. Being that contested information spaces are now ubiquitous, it should also be clear that the competitive dissonance of endlessly self-replicating information hyper-inflation is an effective proxy for conflict. What does this mean? Quite simply: that […]
Context: IQ tests: are humans getting smarter? Intelligence is a topic in which explicability possesses an uncanny correspondence to the behavioural practices by and through which it is defined. Having framed longevity as a plausibly necessary function of intellect, Social Darwinism arrives (yet again) on the Pale Horse as meritocracy wearing a clown hat. Having […]
Superficiality is a function of acceleration. The mainstream flow of technological complexity is such that not only is it quite possible to exist, survive and (indeed) thrive while doing little more than juggling labels, names, references and (other) abbreviations – this is the constitutive default mode of contemporary psychological and cultural experience. Complexity and comprehension […]
The key reason that we are unable to completely and comprehensively understand the world we live in is because the core systems symmetry of analytical leverage necessitates that we, ourselves, are removed from the equation. Any whole systems analysis requires us to consider that there is no outside if the system under analysis. The consequences […]
We do not pilot this vehicle of civilisation anywhere near so much as it pilots us and it is as a relatively unremarkable consequence of human vanity that we remain on the whole almost entirely unable to perceive this.
Sufficiently sophisticated insights into the function and structure of this world are effectively indistinguishable from insanity. In this regard, a profoundly delusional mind is as often aligned with genius as it is with utter absurdity. Questions we might ask here are as to the profound and natural orientation of extreme creativity towards alienation and isolation. […]
What we assume as the central tenet of language and (other) symbolic systems of information-encoding is not in fact its goal, it is a supporting consequence and effective symptom of a system that, like all non-trivially sophisticated or complex entities, first and foremost seeks continuity and replication. The primary purpose of human language is not […]
Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]
Context (but behind a paywall): I asked an AI to tell me how beautiful I am I read today of what appeared to be a technological project and commercial enterprise intent on reducing beauty to an AI-mediated measurement or judgement value system and in the midst of all my horror, some words or observations came […]
